IMPRISONED WITH THE PHARAOHS

By Harry Houdini[ghost-written by H.P. Lovecraft]

for Weird Tales (1924-may)

I

Mystery attracts mystery. Ever since the wide appearance of my
name as a performer of unexplained feats, I have encountered
strange narratives and events which my calling has led people to
link with my interests and activities. Some of these have been
trivial and irrelevant, some deeply dramatic and absorbing, some
productive of weird and perilous experiences and some involving
me in extensive scientific and historical research. Many of these
matters I have told and shall continue to tell very freely; but
there is one of which I speak with great reluctance, and which I
am now relating only after a session of grilling persuasion from
the publishers of this magazine, who had heard vague rumors of it
from other members of my family.

The hitherto guarded subject pertains to my
non-professional visit to Egypt fourteen years ago, and has been
avoided by me for several reasons. For one thing, I am averse to
exploiting certain unmistakably actual facts and conditions
obviously unknown to the myriad tourists who throng about the
pyramids and apparently secreted with much diligence by the
authorities at Cairo, who cannot be wholly ignorant of them. For
another thing, I dislike to recount an incident in which my own
fantastic imagination must have played so great a part. What I
saw -- or thought I saw -- certainly did not take place; but is
rather to be viewed as a result of my then recent readings in
Egyptology, and of the speculations anent this theme which my
environment naturally prompted. These imaginative stimuli,
magnified by the excitement of an actual event terrible enough in
itself, undoubtedly gave rise to the culminating horror of that
grotesque night so long past.

In January, 1910, I had finished a professional
engagement in England and signed a contract for a tour of
Australian theatres. A liberal time being allowed for the trip, I
determined to make the most of it in the sort of travel which
chiefly interests me; so accompanied by my wife I drifted
pleasantly down the Continent and embarked at Marseilles on the
P. & 0. Steamer Malwa, bound for Port Said. From that
point I proposed to visit the principal historical localities of
lower Egypt before leaving finally for Australia.

The voyage was an agreeable one, and enlivened by
many of the amusing incidents which befall a magical performer
apart from his work. I had intended, for the sake of quiet
travel, to keep my name a secret; but was goaded into betraying
myself by a fellow-magician whose anxiety to astound the
passengers with ordinary tricks tempted me to duplicate and
exceed his feats in a manner quite destructive of my incognito. I
mention this because of its ultimate effect -- an effect I should
have foreseen before unmasking to a shipload of tourists about to
scatter throughout the Nile valley. What it did was to herald my
identity wherever I subsequently went, and deprive my wife and me
of all the placid inconspicuousness we had sought. Traveling
to seek curiosities, I was often forced to stand inspection
as a sort of curiosity myself!

We had come to Egypt in search of the picturesque
and mystically impressive, but found little enough when the ship
edged up to Port Said and discharged its passengers in small
boats. Low dunes of sand, bobbing up in shallow water, and a
drearily European small town with nothing of interest save the
great De Lesseps statue, made us anxious to get on to something
more worth our while. After some discussion we decided to proceed
at once to Cairo and the Pyramids, later going to Alexandria for
the Australian boat and for whatever Greco-Roman sights that
ancient metropolis might present.

The railway journey was tolerable enough, and
consumed only four hours and a half. We saw much of the Suez
Canal, whose route we followed as far as Ismailiya and later had
a taste of Old Egypt in our glimpse of the restored fresh-water
canal of the Middle Empire. Then at last we saw Cairo glimmering
through the growing dusk; a winkling constellation which became a
blaze as we halted at the great Gare Centrale.

But once more disappointment awaited us, for all
that we beheld was European save the costumes and the crowds. A
prosaic subway led to a square teeming with carriages, taxicabs,
and trolley-cars and gorgeous with electric lights shining on
tall buildings; whilst the very theatre where I was vainly
requested to play and which I later attended as a spectator, had
recently been renamed "American Cosmograph." We stopped at
Shepheard's Hotel, reached in a taxi that sped along broad,
smartly built-up streets; and amidst the perfect service of, its
restaurant, elevators and generally Anglo-American luxuries the
mysterious East and immemorial past seemed very far away.

The next day, however, precipitated us
delightfully into the heart of the Arabian Nights
atmosphere; and in the winding ways and exotic skyline of Cairo,
the Bagdad of Harun-al-Rashid seemed to live again. Guided by our
Baedeker, we had struck east past the Ezbekiyeh Gardens along the
Mouski in quest of the native quarter, and were soon in the hands
of a clamorous cicerone who -- notwithstanding later developments
-- was assuredly a master at his trade.

Not until afterward did I see that I should have
applied at the hotel for a licensed guide. This man, a shaven,
peculiarly hollow-voiced and relatively cleanly fellow who looked
like a Pharaoh and called himself "Abdul Reis el Drogman,"
appeared to have much power over others of his kind; though
subsequently the police professed not to know him, and to suggest
that reis is merely a name for any person in authority,
whilst "Drogman" is obviously no more than a clumsy modification
of the word for a leader of tourist parties -- dragoman.

Abdul led us among such wonders as we had before
only read and dreamed of. Old Cairo is itself a storybook and a
dream -- labyrinths of narrow alleys redolent of aromatic
secrets; Arabesque balconies and oriels nearly meeting above the
cobbled streets; maelstroms of Oriental traffic with strange
cries, cracking whips, rattling carts, jingling money, and
braying donkeys; kaleidoscopes of polychrome robes, veils,
turbans, and tarbushes; water-carriers and dervishes, dogs and
cats, soothsayers and barbers; and over all the whining of blind
beggars crouched in alcoves, and the sonorous chanting of
muezzins from minarets limned delicately against a sky of deep,
unchanging blue.

The roofed, quieter bazaars were hardly less
alluring. Spice, perfume, incense beads, rugs, silks, and brass
-- old Mahmoud Suleiman squats cross-legged amidst his gummy
bottles while chattering youths pulverize mustard in the
hollowed-out capital of an ancient classic column -- a Roman
Corinthian, perhaps from neighboring Heliopolis, where Augustus
stationed one of his three Egyptian legions. Antiquity begins to
mingle with exoticism. And then the mosques and the museum -- we
saw them all, and tried not to let our Arabian revel succumb to
the darker charm of Pharaonic Egypt which the museum's priceless
treasures offered. That was to be our climax, and for the present
we concentrated on the mediæval Saracenic glories of the
Califs whose magnificent tomb-mosques form a glittering
færy necropolis on the edge of the Arabian Desert.

At length Abdul took us along the Sharia Mohammed
Ali to the ancient mosque of Sultan Hassan, and the tower-flanked
Babel-Azab, beyond which climbs the steep-walled pass to the
mighty citadel that Saladin himself built with the stones of
forgotten pyramids. It was sunset when we scaled that cliff,
circled the modem mosque of Mohammed Ali, and looked down from
the dizzy parapet over mystic Cairo -- mystic Cairo all golden
with its carven domes, its ethereal minarets and its flaming
gardens.

Far over the city towered the great Roman dome of
the new museum; and beyond it -- across the cryptic yellow Nile
that is the mother of eons** and dynasties -- lurked the menacing
sands of the Libyan Desert, undulant and iridescent and evil with
older arcana.

The red sun sank low, bringing the relentless
chill of Egyptian dusk; and as it stood poised on the world's rim
like that ancient god of Heliopolis-Re-Harakhte, the Horizon-Sun
-- we saw silhouetted against its vermeil holocaust the black
outlines of the Pyramids of Gizeh -- the palæogean tombs
there were hoary with a thousand years when Tut-Ankh-Amen mounted
his golden throne in distant Thebes. Then we knew that we were
done with Saracen Cairo, and that we must taste the deeper
mysteries of primal Egypt -- the black Kem of Re and Amen, Isis
and Osiris.

The next morning we visited the Pyramids, riding
out in a Victoria across the island of Chizereh with its massive
lebbakh trees, and the smaller English bridge to the western
shore. Down the shore road we drove, between great rows of
lebbakhs and past the vast Zoological Gardens to the suburb of
Gizeh, where a new bridge to Cairo proper has since been built.
Then, turning inland along the Sharia-el-Haram, we crossed a
region of glassy canals and shabby native villages till before us
loomed the objects of our quest, cleaving the mists of dawn and
forming inverted replicas in the roadside pools. Forty centuries,
as Napoleon had told his campaigners there, indeed looked down
upon us.

The road now rose abruptly, till we finally
reached our place of transfer between the trolley station and the
Mena House Hotel. Abdul Reis, who capably purchased our Pyramid
tickets, seemed to have an understanding with the crowding,
yelling and offensive Bedouins who inhabited a squalid mud
village some distance away and pestiferously assailed every
traveler; for he kept them very decently at bay and secured an
excellent pair of camels for us, himself mounting a donkey and
assigning the leadership of our animals to a group of men and
boys more expensive than useful. The area to be traversed was so
small that camels were hardly needed, but we did not regret
adding to our experience this troublesome form of desert
navigation.

The pyramids stand on a high rock plateau, this
group forming next to the northernmost of the series of regal and
aristocratic cemeteries built in the neighborhood of the extinct
capital Memphis, which lay on the same side of the Nile, somewhat
south of Gizeh, and which flourished between 3400 and 2000 B.C.
The greatest pyramid, which lies nearest the modern road, was
built by King Cheops or Khufu about 2800 B.C., and stands more
than 450 feet in perpendicular height. In a line southwest from
this are successively the Second Pyramid, built a generation
later by King Khephren, and though slightly smaller, looking even
larger because set on higher ground, and the radically smaller
Third Pyramid of King Mycerinus, built about 2700 B.C. Near the
edge of the plateau and due east of the Second Pyramid, with a
face probably altered to form a colossal portrait of Khephren,
its royal restorer, stands the monstrous Sphinx-mute, sardonic,
and wise beyond mankind and memory.

Minor pyramids and the traces of ruined minor
pyramids are found in several places, and the whole plateau is
pitted with the tombs of dignitaries of less than royal rank.
These latter were originally marked by mastabas, or stone
bench-like structures about the deep burial shafts, as found in
other Memphian cemeteries and exemplified by Perneb's Tomb in the
Metropolitan Museum of New York. At Gizeh, however, all such
visible things have been swept away by time and pillage; and only
the rock-hewn shafts, either sand-filled or cleared out by
archæologists, remain to attest their former existence.
Connected with each tomb was a chapel in which priests and
relatives offered food and prayer to the hovering ka or vital
principle of the deceased. The small tombs have their chapels
contained in their stone mastabas or superstructures, but
the mortuary chapels of the pyramids, where regal Pharaohs lay,
were separate temples, each to the east of its corresponding
pyramid, and connected by a causeway to a massive gate-chapel or
propylon at the edge of the rock plateau.

The gate-chapel leading to the Second Pyramid,
nearly buried in the drifting sands, yawns subterraneously
south-east of the Sphinx. Persistent tradition dubs it the
"Temple of the Sphinx"; and it may perhaps be rightly called such
if the Sphinx indeed represents the Second Pyramid's builder
Khephren. There are unpleasant tales of the Sphinx before
Khephren -- but whatever its elder features were, the monarch
replaced them with his own that men might look at the colossus
without fear.

It was in the great gateway-temple that the
life-size diorite statue of Khephren now in the Cairo museum was
found; a statue before which I stood in awe when I beheld it.
Whether the whole edifice is now excavated I am not certain, but
in 1910 most of it was below ground, with the entrance heavily
barred at night. Germans were in charge of the work, and the war
or other things may have stopped them. I would give much, in view
of my experience and of certain Bedouin whisperings discredited
or unknown in Cairo, to know what has developed in connection
with a certain well in a transverse gallery where statues of the
Pharaoh were found in curious juxtaposition to the statues of
baboons.

The road, as we traversed it on our camels that
morning, curved sharply past the wooden police quarters, post
office, drug store and shops on the left, and plunged south and
east in a complete bend that scaled the rock plateau and brought
us face to face with the desert under the lee of the Great
Pyramid. Past Cyclopean masonry we rode, rounding the eastern
face and looking down ahead into a valley of minor pyramids
beyond which the eternal Nile glistened to the east, and the
eternal desert shimmered to the west. Very close loomed the three
major pyramids, the greatest devoid of outer casing and showing
its bulk of great stones, but the others retaining here and there
the neatly fitted covering which had made them smooth and
finished in their day.

Presently we descended toward the Sphinx, and sat
silent beneath the spell of those terrible unseeing eyes. On the
vast stone breast we faintly discerned the emblem of Re-Harakhte,
for whose image the Sphinx was mistaken in a late dynasty; and
though sand covered the tablet between the great paws, we
recalled what Thutmosis IV inscribed thereon, and the dream he
had when a prince. It was then that the smile of the Sphinx
vaguely displeased us, and made us wonder about the legends of
subterranean passages beneath the monstrous creature, leading
down, down, to depths none might dare hint at -- depths connected
with mysteries older than the dynastic Egypt we excavate, and
having a sinister relation to the persistence of abnormal,
animal-headed gods in the ancient Nilotic pantheon. Then, too, it
was I asked myself an idle question whose hideous significance
was not to appear for many an hour.

Other tourists now began to overtake us, and we
moved on to the sand-choked Temple of the Sphinx, fifty yards to
the southeast, which I have previously mentioned as the great
gate of the causeway to the Second Pyramid's mortuary chapel on
the plateau. Most of it was still underground, and although we
dismounted and descended through a modern passageway to its
alabaster corridor and pillared hall, I felt that Abdul and the
local German attendant had not shown us all there was to see.

After this we made the conventional circuit of the
pyramid plateau, examining the Second Pyramid and the peculiar
ruins of its mortuary chapel to the east, the Third Pyramid and
its miniature southern satellites and ruined, eastern chapel, the
rock tombs and the honeycombings of the Fourth and Fifth
dynasties, and the famous Campbell's Tomb whose shadowy shaft
sinks precipitously for fifty-three feet to a sinister
sarcophagus which one of our camel drivers divested of the
cumbering sand after a vertiginous descent by rope.

Cries now assailed us from the Great Pyramid,
where Bedouins were besieging,a party of tourists with offers of
speed in the performance of solitary trips up and down. Seven
minutes is said to be the record for such an ascent and descent,
but many lusty sheiks and sons of sheiks assured us they could
cut it to five if given the requisite impetus of liberal
baksheesh. They did not get this impetus, though we did
let Abdul take us up, thus obtaining a view of unprecedented
magnificence which included not only remote and glittering Cairo
with its crowned citadel background of gold-violet hills, but all
the pyramids of the Memphian district as well, from Abu Roash on
the north to the Dashur on the south. The Sakkara step-pyramid,
which marks the evolution of the low mastaba into the true
pyramid, showed clearly and alluringly in the sandy distance. It
is close to this transition-monument that the famed tomb of Pemeb
was found -- more than four hundred miles north of the Theban
rock valley where Tut-Ankh-Amen sleeps. Again I was forced to
silence through sheer awe. The prospect of such antiquity, and
the secrets each hoary monument seemed to hold and brood over,
filled me with a reverence and sense of immensity nothing else
ever gave me.

Fatigued by our climb, and disgusted with the
importunate Bedouins whose actions seemed to defy every rule of
taste, we omitted the arduous detail of entering the cramped
interior passages of any of the pyramids, though we saw several
of the hardiest tourists preparing for the suffocating crawl
through Cheops' mightiest memorial. As we dismissed and overpaid
our local bodyguard and drove back to Cairo with Abdul Reis under
the afternoon sun, we half regretted the omission we had made.
Such fascinating things were whispered about lower pyramid
passages not in the guide books; passages whose entrances had
been hastily blocked up and concealed by certain uncommunicative
archæologists who had found and began to explore them.

Of course, this whispering was largely baseless on
the face of it; but it was curious to reflect how persistently
visitors were forbidden to enter the Pyramids at night, or to
visit the lowest burrows and crypt of the Great Pyramid. Perhaps
in the latter case it was the psychological effect which was
feared -- the effect on the visitor of feeling himself huddled
down beneath a gigantic world of solid masonry; joined to the
life he has known by the merest tube, in which he may only crawl,
and which any accident or evil design might block. The whole
subject seemed so weird and alluring that we resolved to pay the
pyramid plateau another visit at the earliest possible
opportunity. For me this opportunity came much earlier than I
expected.

That evening, the members of our party feeling
somewhat tired after the strenuous program of the day, I went
alone with Abdul Reis for a walk through the picturesque Arab
quarter. Though I had seen it by day, I wished to study the
alleys and bazaars in the dusk, when rich shadows and mellow
gleams of light would add to their glamor and fantastic illusion.
The native crowds were thinning, but were still very noisy and
numerous when we came upon a knot of reveling Bedouins in the
Suken-Nahhasin, or bazaar of the coppersmiths. Their apparent
leader, an insolent youth with heavy features and saucily cocked
tarbush, took some notice of us, and evidently recognized with no
great friendliness my competent but admittedly supercilious and
sneeringly disposed guide.

Perhaps, I thought, he resented that, odd
reproduction of the Sphinx's half-smile which I had often
remarked with amused irritation; or perhaps he did not like the
hollow and sepulchral resonance of Abdul's voice. At any rate,
the exchange of ancestrally opprobrious language became very
brisk; and before long Ali Ziz, as I heard the stranger called
when called by no worse name, began to pull violently at Abdul's
robe, an action quickly reciprocated and leading to a spirited
scuffle in which both combatants lost their sacredly cherished
headgear and would have reached an even direr condition had I not
intervened and separated them by main force.

My interference, at first seemingly unwelcome on
both sides, succeeded at last in effecting a truce. Sullenly each
belligerent composed his wrath and his attire, and with an
assumption of dignity as profound as it was sudden, the two
formed a curious pact of honor which I soon learned is a custom
of great antiquity in Cairo -- a pact for the settlement of their
difference by means of a nocturnal fist fight atop the Great
Pyramid, long after the departure of the last moonlight
sightseer. Each duellist was to assemble a party of seconds, and
the affair was to begin at midnight, proceeding by rounds in the
most civilized possible fashion.

In all this planning there was much which excited
my interest. The fight itself promised to be unique and
spectacular, while the thought of the scene on that hoary pile
overlooking the antediluvian plateau of Gizeh under the wan moon
of the pallid small hours appealed to every fiber of imagination
in me. A request found Abdul exceedingly willing to admit me to
his party of seconds; so that all the rest of the early evening I
accompanied him to various dens in the most lawless regions of
the town -- mostly northeast of the Ezbekiyeh -- where he
gathered one by one a select and formidable band of congenial
cutthroats as his pugilistic background.

Shortly after nine our party, mounted on donkeys
bearing such royal or tourist-reminiscent names as "Rameses,"
"Mark Twain," "J. P. Morgan," and "Minnehaha," edged through
street labyrinths both Oriental and Occidental, crossed the muddy
and mast-forested Nile by the bridge of the bronze lions, and
cantered philosophically between the lebbakhs on the road to
Gizeh. Slightly over two hours were consumed by the trip, toward
the end of which we passed the last of the returning tourists,
saluted the last inbound trolley-car, and were alone with the
night and the past and the spectral moon.

Then we saw the vast pyramids at the end of the
avenue, ghoulish with a dim atavistical menace which I had not
seemed to notice in the daytime. Even the smallest of them held a
hint of the ghastly -- for was it not in this that they had
buried Queen Nitocris alive in the Sixth Dynasty; subtle Queen
Nitocris, who once invited all her, enemies to a feast in a
temple below the Nile, and drowned them by opening the
watergates? I recalled that the Arabs whisper things about
Nitocris, and shun the Third Pyramid at certain phases of the
moon. It must have been over her that Thomas Moore was brooding
when he wrote a thing muttered about by Memphian boatmen:

"The subterranean nymph that dwells
'Mid sunless gems and glories hid --
The lady of the Pyramid!"

Early as we were, Ali Ziz and his party were ahead
of us; for we saw their donkeys outlined against the desert
plateau at Kafrel-Haram; toward which squalid Arab settlement,
close to the Sphinx, we had diverged instead of following the
regular road to the Mena House, where some of the sleepy,
inefficient police might have observed and halted us. Here, where
filthy Bedouins stabled camels and donkeys in the rock tombs of
Khephren's courtiers, we were led up the rocks and over the sand
to the Great Pyramid, up whose time-worn sides the Arabs swarmed
eagerly, Abdul Reis offering me the assistance I did not need.

As most travelers know, the actual apex of this
structure has long been worn away, leaving a reasonably flat
platform twelve yards square. On this eery pinnacle a squared
circle was formed, and in a few moments the sardonic desert moon
leered down upon a battle which, but for the quality of the
ringside cries, might well have occurred at some minor athletic
club in America. As I watched it, I felt that some of our less
desirable institutions were not lacking; for every blow, feint,
and defense bespoke "stalling" to my not inexperienced eye. It
was quickly over, and despite my misgivings as to methods I felt
a sort of proprietary pride when Abdul Reis was adjudged the
winner.

Reconciliation was phenomenally rapid, and amidst
the singing, fraternizing and drinking which followed, I found it
difficult to realize that a quarrel had ever occurred. Oddly
enough, I myself seemed to be more a center of notice than the
antagonists; and from my smattering of Arabic I judged that they
were discussing my professional performances and escapes from
every sort of manacle and confinement, in a manner which
indicated not only a surprising knowledge of me, but a distinct
hostility and skepticism concerning my feats of escape. It
gradually dawned on me that the elder magic of Egypt did not
depart without leaving traces, and that fragments of a strange
secret lore and priestly cult-practices have survived
surreptitiously amongst the fellaheen to such an extent that the
prowess of a strange hahwi or magician is resented and
disputed. I thought of how much my hollow-voiced guide Abdul
Reis looked like an old Egyptian priest or Pharaoh or smiling
Sphinx ... and wondered.

Suddenly something happened which in a flash
proved the correctness of my reflections and made me curse the
denseness whereby I had accepted this night's events as other
than the empty and malicious "frameup" they now showed themselves
to be. Without warning, and doubtless in answer to some subtle
sign from Abdul, the entire band of Bedouins precipitated itself
upon me; and having produced heavy ropes, soon had me bound as
securely as I was ever bound in the course of my life, either on
the stage or off.

I struggled at first, but soon saw that one man
could make no headway against a band of over twenty sinewy
barbarians. My hands were tied behind my back, my knees bent to
their fullest extent, and my wrists and ankles stoutly linked
together with unyielding cords. A stifling gag was forced into my
mouth, and a blindfold fastened tightly over my eyes. Then, as
Arabs bore me aloft on their shoulders and began a jouncing
descent of the pyramid, I heard the taunts of my late guide
Abdul, who mocked and jeered delightedly in his hollow voice, and
assured me that I was soon to have my "magic powers" put to a
supreme test which would quickly remove any egotism I might have
gained through triumphing over all the tests offered by America
and Europe. Egypt, he reminded me, is very old, and full of inner
mysteries and antique powers not even conceivable to the experts
of to-day, whose devices had so uniformly failed to entrap me.

How far or in what direction I was carried, I
cannot tell; for the circumstances were all against the formation
of any accurate judgment. I know, however, that it could not have
been a great distance; since my bearers at no point hastened
beyond a walk, yet kept me aloft a surprisingly short time. It is
this perplexing brevity which makes me feel almost like
shuddering whenever I think of Gizeh and its plateau -- for one
is oppressed by hints of the closeness to everyday tourist routes
of what existed then and must exist still.

The evil abnormality I speak of did not become
manifest at first. Setting me down on a surface which I
recognized as sand rather than rock, my captors passed a rope
around my chest and dragged me a few feet to a ragged opening in
the ground, into which they presently lowered me with much rough
handling. For apparent eons** I bumped against the stony
irregular sides of a narrow hewn well which I took to be one of
the numerous burial-shafts of the plateau until the prodigious,
almost incredible depth of it robbed me of all bases of
conjecture.

The horror of the experience deepened with every
dragging second. That any descent through the sheer solid rock
could be so vast without reaching the core of the planet itself,
or that any rope made by man could be so long as to dangle me in
these unholy and seemingly fathomless profundities of nether
earth, were beliefs of such grotesqueness that it was easier to
doubt my agitated senses than to accept them. Even now I am
uncertain, for I know how deceitful the sense of time becomes
when one is removed or distorted. But I am quite sure that I
preserved a logical consciousness that far; that at least I did
not add any fullgrown phantoms of imagination to a picture
hideous enough in its reality, and explicable by a type of
cerebral illusion vastly short of actual hallucination.

All this was not the cause of my first bit of
fainting. The shocking ordeal was cumulative, and the beginning
of the later terrors was a very perceptible increase in my rate
of descent. They were paying out that infinitely long rope very
swiftly now, and I scraped cruelly against the rough and
constricted sides of the shaft as I shot madly downward. My
clothing was in tatters, and I felt the trickle of blood all
over, even above the mounting and excruciating pain. My nostrils,
too, were assailed by a scarcely definable menace: a creeping
odor of damp and staleness curiously unlike anything I had ever
smelled before, and having faint overtones of spice and incense
that lent an element of mockery.

Then the mental cataclysm came. It was horrible --
hideous beyond all articulate description because it was all of
the soul, with nothing of detail to describe. It was the ecstasy
of nightmare and the summation of the fiendish. The suddenness of
it was apocalyptic and demoniac -- one moment I was plunging
agonizingly down that narrow well of million-toothed torture, yet
the next moment I was soaring on bat-wings in the gulfs of hell;
swinging free and swoopingly through illimitable miles of
boundless, musty space; rising dizzily to measureless pinnacles
of chilling æther, then diving gaspingly to sucking nadirs
of ravenous, nauseous lower vacua.... Thank God for the mercy
that shut out in oblivion those clawing Furies of consciousness
which half unhinged my faculties, and tore harpy-like at my
spirit! That one respite, short as it was, gave me the strength
and sanity to endure those still greater sublimations of cosmic
panic that lurked and gibbered on the road ahead.

II

It was very gradually that I regained my senses
after that eldritch flight through stygian space. The process was
infinitely painful, and colored by fantastic dreams in which my
bound and gagged condition found singular embodiment. The precise
nature of these dreams was very clear while I was experiencing
them, but became blurred in my recollection almost immediately
afterward, and was soon reduced to the merest outline by the
terrible events -- real or imaginary -- which followed. I dreamed
that I was in the grasp of a great and horrible paw; a yellow,
hairy, five-clawed paw which had reached out of the earth to
crush and engulf me. And when I stopped to reflect what the paw
was, it seemed to me that it was Egypt. In the dream I looked
back at the events of the preceding weeks, and saw myself lured
and enmeshed little by little, subtly and insidiously, by some
hellish ghoul-spirit of the elder Nile sorcery; some spirit that
was in Egypt before ever man was, and that will be when man is no
more.

I saw the horror and unwholesome antiquity of
Egypt, and the grisly alliance it has always had with the tombs
and temples of the dead. I saw phantom processions of priests
with the heads of bulls, falcons, cats, and ibises; phantom
processions marching interminably through subterraneous
labyrinths and avenues of titanic propylæa beside which a
man is as a fly, and offering unnameable sacrifice to
indescribable gods. Stone colossi marched in endless night and
drove herds of grinning androsphinxes down to the shores of
illimitable stagnant rivers of pitch. And behind it all I saw the
ineffable malignity of primordial necromancy, black and
amorphous, and fumbling greedily after me in the darkness to
choke out the spirit that had dared to mock it by emulation.

In my sleeping brain there took shape a melodrama
of sinister hatred and pursuit, and I saw the black soul of Egypt
singling me out and calling me in inaudible whispers; calling and
luring me, leading me on with the glitter and glamor of a
Saracenic surface, but ever pulling me down to the age-mad
catacombs and horrors of its dead and abysmal pharaonic heart.

Then the dream faces took on human resemblances,
and I saw my guide Abdul Reis in the robes of a king, with the
sneer of the Sphinx on his features. And I knew that those
features were the features of Khephren the Great, who raised the
Second Pyramid, carved over the Sphinx's face in the likeness of
his own and built that titanic gateway temple whose myraid
corridors the archæologists think they have dug out of the
cryptical sand and the uninformative rock. And I looked at the
long, lean, rigid hand of Khephren; the long, lean, rigid hand as
I had seen it on the diorite statue in the Cairo Museum -- the
statue they had found in the terrible gateway temple -- and
wondered that I had not shrieked when I saw it on Abdul Reis....
That hand! It was hideously cold, and it was crushing me; it was
the cold and cramping of the sarcophagus.... the chill and
constriction of unrememberable Egypt.... It was nighted,
necropolitan Egypt itself.... that yellow paw and they whisper
such things of Khephren....

But at this juncture I began to awake -- or at
least, to assume a condition less completely that of sleep than
the one just preceding. I recalled the fight atop the pyramid,
the treacherous Bedouins and their attack, my frightful descent
by rope through endless rock depths, and my mad swinging and
plunging in a chill void redolent of aromatic putrescence. I
perceived that I now lay on a damp rock floor, and that my bonds
were still biting into me with unloosened force. It was very
cold, and I seemed to detect a faint current of noisome air
sweeping across me. The cuts and bruises I had received from the
jagged sides of the rock shaft were paining me woefully, their
soreness enhanced to a stinging or burning acuteness by some
pungent quality in the faint draft, and the mere act of rolling
over was enough to set my whole frame throbbing with untold
agony.

As I turned I felt a tug from above, and concluded
that the rope whereby I was lowered still reached to the surface.
Whether or not the Arabs still held it, I had no idea; nor had I
any idea how far within the earth I was. I knew that the darkness
around me was wholly or nearly total, since no ray of moonlight
penetrated my blindfold; but I did not trust my senses enough to
accept as evidence of extreme depth the sensation of vast
duration which had characterized my descent.

Knowing at least that I was in a space of
considerable extent reached from the surface directly above by an
opening in the rock, I doubtfully conjectured that my prison
was perhaps the buried gateway chapel of old Khephren -- the
Temple of the Sphinx -- perhaps some inner corridor which the
guides had not shown me during my morning visit, and from which I
might easily escape if I could find my way to the barred
entrance. It would be a labyrinthine wandering, but no worse than
others out of which I had in the past found my way.

The first step was to get free of my bonds, gag,
and blindfold; and this I knew would be no great task, since
subtler experts than these Arabs had tried every known species of
fetter upon me during my long and varied career as an exponent of
escape, yet had never succeeded in defeating my methods.

Then it occurred to me that the Arabs might be
ready to meet and attack me at the entrance upon any evidence of
my probable escape from the binding cords, as would be furnished
by any decided agitation of the rope which they probably held.
This, of course, was taking for granted that my place of
confinement was indeed Khephren's Temple of the Sphinx. The
direct opening in the roof, wherever it might lurk, could not be
beyond easy reach of the ordinary modern entrance near the
Sphinx; if in truth it were any great distance at all on the
surface, since the total area known to visitors is not at all
enormous. I had not noticed any such opening during my daytime
pilgrimage, but knew that these things are easily overlooked
amidst the drifting sands.

Thinking these matters over as I lay bent and
bound on the rock floor, I nearly forgot the horrors of abysmal
descent and cavernous swinging which had so lately reduced me to
a coma. My present thought was only to outwit the Arabs, and I
accordingly determined to work myself free as quickly as
possible, avoiding any tug on the descending line which might
betray an effective or even problematical attempt at freedom.

This, however, was more easily determined than
effected. A few preliminary trials made it clear that little
could be accomplished without considerable motion; and it did not
surprise me when, after one especially energetic struggle, I
began to feel the coils of falling rope as they piled up about me
and upon me. Obviously, I thought, the Bedouins had felt my
movements and released their end of the rope; hastening no doubt
to the temple's true entrance to lie murderously in wait for me.

The prospect was not pleasing -- but I had faced
worse in my time without flinching, and would not flinch now. At,
present I must first of all free myself of bonds, then trust to
ingenuity to escape from the temple unharmed. It is curious how
implicitly I had come to believe myself in the old temple of
Khephren beside the Sphinx, only a short distance below the
ground.

That belief was shattered, and every pristine
apprehension of preternatural** depth and demoniac mystery
revived, by a circumstance which grew in horror and significance
even as I formulated my philosophical plan. I have said that the
falling rope was piling up about and upon me. Now I saw that it
was continuing to pile, as no rope of normal length could
possibly do. It gained in momentum and became an avalanche of
hemp, accumulating mountainously on the floor and half burying me
beneath its swiftly multiplying coils. Soon I was completely
engulfed and gasping for breath as the increasing convolutions
submerged and stifled me.

My senses tottered again, and I vainly tried to
fight off a menace desperate and ineluctable. It was not merely
that I was tortured beyond human endurance -- not merely, that
life and breath seemed to be crushed slowly out of me -- it was
the knowledge of what those unnatural lengths of rope implied,
and the consciousness of what unknown and incalculable gulfs of
inner earth must at this moment be surrounding me. My endless
descent and swinging flight through goblin space, then, must have
been real, and even now I must be lying helpless in some nameless
cavern world toward the core of the planet. Such a sudden
confirmation of ultimate horror was insupportable, and a second
time I lapsed into merciful oblivion.

When I say oblivion, I do not imply that I was
free from dreams. On the contrary, my absence from the conscious
world was marked by visions of the most unutterable hideousness.
God!... If only I had not read so much Egyptology before coming
to this land which is the fountain of all darkness and terror!
This second spell of fainting filled my sleeping mind anew with
shivering realization of the country and its archaic secrets, and
through some damnable chance my dreams turned to the ancient
notions of the dead and their sojournings in soul and body beyond
those mysterious tombs which were more houses than graves. I
recalled, in dream-shapes which it is well that I do not
remember, the peculiar and elaborate construction of Egyptian
sepulchers; and the exceedingly singular and terrific doctrines
which determined this construction.

All these people thought of was death and the
dead. They conceived of a literal resurrection of the body which
made them mummify it with desperate care, and preserve all the
vital organs in canopic jars near the corpse; whilst besides the
body they believed in two other elements, the soul, which after
its weighing and approval by Osiris dwelt in the land of the
blest, and the obscure and portentous ka or life-principle
which wandered about the upper and lower worlds in a horrible
way, demanding occasional access to the preserved body, consuming
the food offerings brought by priests and pious relatives to the
mortuary chapel, and sometimes -- as men whispered -- taking its
body or the wooden double always buried beside it and stalking
noxiously abroad on errands peculiarly repellent.

For thousands of years those bodies rested
gorgeously encased and staring glassily upward when not visited
by the ka, awaiting the day when Osiris should restore
both ka and soul, and lead forth the stiff legions of the
dead from the sunken houses of sleep. It was to have been a
glorious rebirth -- but not all souls were approved, nor were all
tombs inviolate, so that certain grotesque mistakes and
fiendish abnormalities were to be looked for. Even today
the Arabs murmur of unsanctified convocations and unwholesome
worship in forgotten nether abysses, which only winged invisible
kas and soulless mummies may visit and return unscathed.

Perhaps the most leeringly blood-congealing
legends are those which relate to certain perverse products of
decadent priestcraft -- composite mummies made by the
artificial union of human trunks and limbs with the heads of
animals in imitation of the elder gods. At all stages of history
the sacred animals were mummified, so that consecrated bulls,
cats, ibises, crocodiles and the like might return some day to
greater glory. But only in the decadence did they mix the human
and animal in the same mummy -- only in the decadence, when they
did not understand the rights and prerogatives of the ka
and the soul.

What happened to those composite mummies is not
told of -- at least publicly -- and it is certain that no
Egyptologist ever found one. The whispers of Arabs are very wild,
and cannot be relied upon. They even hint that old Khephren -- he
of the Sphinx, the Second Pyramid and the yawning gateway temple
-- lives far underground wedded to the ghoul-queen Nitocris and
ruling over the mummies that are neither of man nor of beast.

It was of these -- of Khephren and his consort and
his strange armies of the hybrid dead -- that I dreamed, and
that is why I am glad the exact dream-shapes have faded from my
memory. My most horrible vision was connected with an idle
question I had asked myself the day before when looking at the
great carven riddle of the desert and wondering with what unknown
depth the temple close to it might be secretly connected. That
question, so innocent and whimsical then, assumed in my dream a
meaning of frenetic and hysterical madness.... what huge and
loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to
represent?

My second awakening -- if awakening it was -- is a
memory of stark hideousness which nothing else in my life -- save
one thing which came after--can parallel; and that life has been
full and adventurous beyond most men's. Remember that I had lost
consciousness whilst buried beneath a cascade of falling rope
whose immensity revealed the cataclysmic depth of my present
position. Now, as perception returned, I felt the entire weight
gone; and realized upon rolling over that although I was still
tied, gagged and blindfolded, some agency had removed
completely the suffocating hempen landslide which had overwhelmed
me. The significance of this condition, of course, came to
me only gradually; but even so I think it would have brought
unconsciousness again had I not by this time reached such a state
of emotional exhaustion that no new horror could make much
difference. I was alone.... with what?

Before I could torture myself with any new
reflection, or make any fresh effort to escape from my bonds, an
additional circumstance became manifest. Pains not formerly felt
were racking my arms and legs, and I seemed coated with a
profusion of dried blood beyond anything my former cuts and
abrasions could furnish. My chest, too, seemed pierced by a
hundred wounds, as though some malign, titanic ibis had been
pecking at it. Assuredly the agency which had removed the rope
was a hostile one, and had begun to wreak terrible injuries upon
me when somehow impelled to desist. Yet at the time my sensations
were distinctly the reverse of what one might expect. Instead of
sinking into a bottomless pit of despair, I was stirred to a new
courage and action; for now I felt that the evil forces were
physical things which a fearless man might encounter on an even
basis.

On the strength of this thought I tugged again at
my bonds, and used all the art of a lifetime to free myself as I
had so often done amidst the glare of lights and the applause of
vast crowds. The familiar details of my escaping process
commenced to engross me, and now that the long rope was gone I
half regained my belief that the supreme horrors were
hallucinations after all, and that there had never been any
terrible shaft, measureless abyss or interminable rope. Was I
after all in the gateway temple of Khephren beside the Sphinx,
and had the sneaking Arabs stolen in to torture me as I lay
helpless there? At any rate, I must be free. Let me stand up
unbound, ungagged, and with eyes open to catch any glimmer of
light which might come trickling from any source, and I could
actually delight in the combat against evil and treacherous
foes!

How long I took in shaking off my encumbrances I
cannot tell. It must have been longer than in my exhibition
performances, because I was wounded, exhausted, and enervated by
the experiences I had passed through. When I was finally free,
and taking deep breaths of a chill, damp evilly spiced air all
the more horrible when encountered without the screen of gag and
blindfold edges, I found that I was too cramped and fatigued to
move at once. There I lay, trying to stretch a frame bent and
mangled, for an indefinite period, and straining my eyes to catch
a glimpse of some ray of light which would give a hint as to my
position.

By degrees my strength and flexibility returned,
but my eyes beheld nothing. As I staggered to my feet I peered
diligently in every direction, yet met only an ebony blackness as
great as that I had known when blindfolded. I tried my legs,
blood-encrusted beneath my shredded trousers, and found that I
could walk; yet could not decide in what direction to go.
Obviously I ought not to walk at random, and perhaps retreat
directly from the entrance I sought; so I paused to note the
direction of the cold, ftid, natron-scented air-current
which I had never ceased to feel. Accepting the point of its
source as the possible entrance to the abyss, I strove to keep
track of this landmark and to walk consistently toward it.

I had a match-box with me, and even a small
electric flashlight; but of course the pockets of my tossed and
tattered clothing were long since emptied of all heavy articles.
As I walked cautiously in the blackness, the draft grew stronger
and more offensive, till at length I could regard it as nothing
less than a tangible stream of detestable vapor pouring out of
some aperture like the smoke of the genie from the fisherman's
jar in the Eastern tale. The East.... Egypt.... truly, this dark
cradle of civilization was ever the wellspring of horrors and
marvels unspeakable!

The more I reflected on the nature of this cavern
wind, the greater my sense of disquiet became; for although
despite its odor I had sought its source as at least an indirect
clue to the outer world, I now saw plainly that this foul
emanation could have no admixture or connection whatsoever with
the clean air of the Libyan Desert, but must be essentially a
thing vomited from sinister gulfs still lower down. I had, then,
been walking in the wrong direction!

After a moment's reflection I decided not to
retrace my steps, Away from the draft I would have no landmarks,
for the roughly level rock floor was devoid of distinctive
configurations. If, however, I followed up the strange current, I
would undoubtedly arrive at an aperture of some sort, from whose
gate I could perhaps work round the walls to the opposite side of
this Cyclopean and otherwise unnavigable hall. That I might fail,
I well realized. I saw that this was no part of Khephren's
gateway temple which tourists know, and it struck me that this
particular hall might be unknown even to archæologists, and
merely stumbled upon by the inquisitive and malignant Arabs who
had imprisoned me. If so, was there any present gate of escape to
the known parts or to the outer air?

What evidence, indeed, did I now possess that this
was the gateway temple at all? For a moment all my wildest
speculations rushed back upon me, and I thought of that vivid
melange of impressions -- descent, suspension in space, the rope,
my wounds, and the dreams that were frankly dreams. Was this the
end of life for me? Or indeed, would it be merciful if this
moment were the end? I could answer none of my own
questions, but merely kept on, till Fate for a third time reduced
me to oblivion.

This time there were no dreams, for the suddenness
of the incident shocked me out of all thought either conscious or
subconscious. Tripping on an unexpected descending step at a
point where the offensive draft became strong enough to offer an
actual physical resistance, I was precipitated headlong down a
black flight of huge stone stairs into a gulf of hideousness
unrelieved.

That I ever breathed again is a tribute to the
inherent vitality of the healthy human organism. Often I look
back to that night and feel a touch of actual humor in those
repeated lapses of consciousness; lapses whose succession
reminded me at the time of nothing more than the crude cinema
melodramas of that period. Of course, it is possible that the
repeated lapses never occurred; and that all the features of that
underground nightmare were merely the dreams of one long coma
which began with the shock of my descent into that abyss and
ended with the healing balm of the outer air and of the rising
sun which found me stretched on the sands of Gizeh before the
sardonic and dawn-flushed face of the Great Sphinx.

I prefer to believe this latter explanation as
much as I can, hence was glad when the police told: me that the
barrier to Elephren's gateway temple had been found unfastened,
and that a sizable rift to the surface did actually exist in one
comer of the still buried part. I was glad, too, when the doctors
pronounced my wounds only those to be expected from my seizure,
blindfolding, lowering, struggling with bonds, failing some
distance -- perhaps into a depression in the temple's inner
gallery -- dragging myself to the outer barrier and escaping from
it, and experiences like that.... a very soothing diagnosis. And
yet I know that there must be more than appears on the surface.
That extreme descent is too vivid a memory to be dismissed -- and
it is odd that no one has ever been able to find a man answering
the description of my guide, Abdul Reis el Drogman -- the
tomb-throated guide who looked and smiled like King Khephren.

I have digressed from my connected narrative --
perhaps in the vain hope of evading the telling of that final
incident; that incident which of all is most certainly an
hallucination. But I promised to relate it, and I do not break
promises. When I recovered -- or seemed to recover -- my senses
after that fall down the black stone stairs, I was quite as alone
and in darkness as before. The windy stench, bad enough before,
was now fiendish; yet I had acquired enough familiarity by this
time to bear it stoically. Dazedly I began to crawl away from the
place whence the putrid wind came, and with my bleeding hands
felt the colossal blocks of a mighty pavement. Once my head
struck against a hard object, and when I felt of it I learned
that it was the base of a column -- a column of unbelievable
immensity -- whose surface was covered with gigantic chiseled
hieroglyphics very perceptible to my touch.

Crawling on, I encountered other titan columns at
incomprehensible distances apart; when suddenly my attention was
captured by the realization of something which must have been
impinging on my subconscious hearing long before the conscious
sense was aware of it.

From some still lower chasm in earth's bowels were
proceeding certain sounds, measured and definite, and
like nothing I had ever heard before. That they were very ancient
and distinctly ceremonial I felt almost intuitively; and much
reading in Egyptology led me to associate them with the flute,
the sambuke, the sistrum, and the tympanum. In their rhythmic
piping, droning, rattling and beating I felt an element of terror
beyond all the known terrors of earth -- a terror peculiarly
dissociated from personal fear, and taking the form of a sort of
objective pity for our planet, that it should hold within its
depths such horrors as must lie beyond these ægipanic
cacophonies. The sounds increased in volume, and I felt that they
were approaching. Then -- and may all the gods of all pantheons
unite to keep the like from my ears again -- I began to hear,
faintly and afar off, the morbid and millennial tramping of the
marching things.

It was hideous that footfalls so dissimilar should
move in such perfect rhythm. The training of unhallowed thousands
of years must lie behind that march of earth's inmost
monstrosities.... padding, clicking, walking, stalking, rumbling,
lumbering, crawling.... and all to the abhorrent discords of
those mocking instruments. And then -- God keep the memory of
those Arab legends out of my head! -- the mummies without
souls.... the meeting-place of the wandering kas.... the
hordes of the devil-cursed pharaonic dead of forty centuries....
the composite mummies led through the uttermost onyx
voids by King Khephren and his ghoul-queen Nitocris....

The tramping drew nearer -- Heaven save me from
the sound of those feet and paws and hooves and pads and talons
as it commenced to acquire detail! Down limitless reaches of
sunless pavement a spark of light flickered in the malodorous
wind and I drew behind the enormous circumference of a Cyclopic
column that I might escape for a while the horror that was
stalking million-footed toward me through gigantic hypostyles of
inhuman dread and phobic antiquity. The flickers increased, and
the tramping and dissonant rhythm grew sickeningly loud. In the
quivering orange light there stood faintly forth a scene of such
stony awe that I gasped from sheer wonder that conquered even
fear and repulsion. Bases of columns whose middles were higher
than human sight.... mere bases of things that must each dwarf
the Eiffel Tower to insignificance.... hieroglyphics carved by
unthinkable hands in caverns where daylight can be only a remote
legend....

I would not look at the marching things.
That I desperately resolved as I heard their creaking joints and
nitrous wheezing above the dead music and the dead tramping. It
was merciful that they did not speak.... but God! their crazy
torches began to cast shadows on the surface of those stupendous
columns. Hippopotami should not have human hands and carry
torches.... men should not have the heads of crocodiles....

I tried to turn away, but the shadows and the
sounds and the stench were everywhere. Then I remembered
something I used to do in half-conscious nightmares as a boy, and
began to repeat to myself, "This is a dream! This is a dream!"
But it was of no use, and I could only shut my eyes and pray....
at least, that is what I think I did, for one is never sure in
visions -- and I know this can have been nothing more. I wondered
whether I should ever reach the world again, and at times would
furtively open my eyes to see if I could discern any feature of
the place other than the wind of spiced putrefaction, the topless
columns, and the thaumatropically grotesque shadows of abnormal
horror. The sputtering glare of multiplying torches now shone,
and unless this hellish place were wholly without walls, I could
not fail to see some boundary or fixed landmark soon. But I had
to shut my eyes again when I realized how many of the things were
assembling -- and when I glimpsed a certain object walking
solemnly and steadily without any body above the waist.

A fiendish and ululant corpse-gurgle or
death-rattle now split the very atmosphere -- the charnel
atmosphere poisonous with naftha and bitumen blasts -- in one
concerted chorus from the ghoulish legion of hybrid blasphemies.
My eyes, perversely shaken open, gazed for an instant upon a
sight which no human creature could even imagine without panic,
fear and physical exhaustion. The things had filed ceremonially
in one direction, the direction of the noisome wind, where the
light of their torches showed their bended heads -- or the bended
heads of such as had heads. They were worshipping before a great
black ftor-belching aperture which reached up almost out of
sight, and which I could see was flanked at right angles by two
giant staircases whose ends were far away in shadow. One of these
was indubitably the staircase I had fallen down.

The dimensions of the hole were fully in
proportion with those of the columns -- an ordinary house would
have been lost in it, and any average public building could
easily have been moved in and out. It was so vast a surface that
only by moving the eye could one trace its boundaries.... so
vast, so hideously black, and so aromatically stinking....
Directly in front of this yawning Polyphemus-door the things were
throwing objects -- evidently sacrifices or religious offerings,
to judge by their gestures. Khephren was their leader; sneering
King Khephren or the guide Abdul Reis, crowned with a
golden pshent and intoning endless formulæ with the hollow
voice of the dead. By his side knelt beautiful Queen Nitocris,
whom I saw in profile for a moment, noting that the right half of
her face was eaten away by rats or other ghouls. And I shut my
eyes again when I saw what objects were being thrown as offerings
to the ftid aperture or its possible local deity.

It occurred to me that, judging from the
elaborateness of this worship, the concealed deity must be one of
considerable importance. Was it Osiris or Isis, Horns or Anubis,
or some vast unknown God of the Dead still more central and
supreme? There is a legend that terrible altars and colossi were
reared to an Unknown One before ever the known gods were
worshipped....

And now, as I steeled myself to watch the rapt and
sepulchral adorations of those nameless things, a thought of
escape flashed upon me. The hall was dim, and the columns heavy
with shadow. With every creature of that nightmare throng
absorbed in shocking raptures, it might be barely possible for me
to creep past to the far-away end of one of the staircases and
ascend unseen; trusting to Fate and skill to deliver me from the
upper reaches. Where I was, I neither knew nor seriously
reflected upon -- and for a moment it struck me as amusing to
plan a serious escape from that which I knew to be a dream. Was I
in some hidden and unsuspected lower realm of Khephren's gateway
temple -- that temple which generations have persistently called
the Temple of the Sphinx? I could not conjecture, but I resolved
to ascend to life and consciousness if wit and muscle could carry
me.

Wriggling flat on my stomach, I began the anxious
journey toward the foot of the left-hand staircase, which seemed
the more accessible of the two. I cannot describe the incidents
and sensations of that crawl, but they may be guessed when one
reflects on what I had to watch steadily in that malign,
wind-blown torchlight in order to avoid detection. The bottom of
the staircase was, as I have said, far away in shadow, as it had
to be to rise without a bend to the dizzy parapeted landing above
the titanic aperture. This placed the last stages of my crawl at
some distance from the noisome herd, though the spectacle chilled
me even when quite remote at my right.

At length I succeeded in reaching the steps and
began to climb; keeping close to the wall, on which I observed
decorations of the most hideous sort, and relying for safety on
the absorbed, ecstatic interest with which the monstrosities
watched the foul-breezed aperture and the impious objects of
nourishment they had flung on the pavement before it. Though the
staircase was huge and steep, fashioned of vast porphyry blocks
as if for the feet of a giant, the ascent seemed virtually
interminable. Dread of discovery and the pain which renewed
exercise had brought to my wounds combined to make that upward
crawl a thing of agonizing memory. I had intended, on reaching
the landing, to climb immediately onward along whatever upper
staircase might mount from there; stopping for no last look at
the carrion abominations that pawed and genuflected some seventy
or eighty feet below -- yet a sudden repetition of that
thunderous corpse-gurgle and death-rattle chorus, coming as I had
nearly gained the top of the flight and showing by its ceremonial
rhythm that it was not an alarm of my discovery, caused me to
pause and peer cautiously over the parapet.

The monstrosities were hailing something which had
poked itself out of the nauseous aperture to seize the hellish
fare proffered it. It was something quite ponderous, even as seen
from my height; something yellowish and hairy, and endowed with a
sort of nervous motion. It was as large, perhaps, as a good-sized
hippopotamus, but very curiously shaped. It seemed to have no
neck, but five separate shaggy heads springing in a row from a
roughly cylindrical trunk; the first very small, the second
good-sized, the third and fourth equal and largest of all, and
the fifth rather small, though not so small as the first.

Out of these heads darted curious rigid tentacles
which seized ravenously on the excessively great quantities of
unmentionable food placed before the aperture. Once in a while
the thing would leap up, and occasionally it would retreat into
its den in a very odd manner. Its locomotion was so inexplicable
that I stared in fascination, wishing it would emerge farther
from the cavernous lair beneath me.

Then it did emerge.... it did
emerge, and at the sight I turned and fled into the darkness up
the higher staircase that rose behind me; fled unknowingly up
incredible steps and ladders and inclined planes to which no
human sight or logic guided me, and which I must ever relegate to
the world of dreams for want of any confirmation. It must have
been a dream, or the dawn would never have found me breathing on
the sands of Gizeh before the sardonic dawn-flushed face of the
Great Sphinx.

The Great Sphinx! God! -- that idle question I
asked myself on that sun-blest morning before.... what huge
and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to
represent? Accursed is the sight, be it in dream or not,
that revealed to me the supreme horror -- the unknown God of the
Dead, which licks its colossal chops in the unsuspected abyss,
fed hideous morsels by soulless absurdities that should not
exist. The five-headed monster that emerged.... that five-headed
monster as large as a hippopotamus.... the five-headed monster --
and that of which it is the merest forepaw....